


Easy

by auroreanrave



Category: Glee
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Future, Ambition, Drabble, Gen, New York City, Racial Epithets, Real Life, Twenty-Something Life, after high school
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-10
Updated: 2014-05-10
Packaged: 2018-01-24 04:22:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1591553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/auroreanrave/pseuds/auroreanrave
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tina knows her odds of making it in the big city.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Easy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NotLostAnymore](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NotLostAnymore/gifts).



> Takes place in a world where Tina heads to New York to try and become a singer.
> 
> Gift for NotLostAnymore

Tina knows her odds in the big city.

Sure, she has some luck on her side; she's got a big stipend from her parents, and enough goodwill saved up from eighteen years of being a relatively good daughter (gothic clothing and normal teenage rebellions aside) that moving to the East Coast takes only a few days for her to win them over, and not the month Tina had originally sketched out in her head.

But that alone won't be enough to cut it in New York City. Not if she wants to live her dreams.

She's not like Rachel. That's for damn sure. Rachel is talented, sure, but she's also like a comet - bright and searing and painful in equal measure, and while Rachel will no doubt soar to the heights of whatever Broadway production she finds herself on, she won't remember the little people, won't remember the people she called friends for three years. Not really, anyway.

Tina doesn't want to be like that. Not after all the crap she went through in high school, even if a decent enough amount of it was self-induced. She's maturing. She hopes, anyway.

She doesn't get into NYADA. Or Julliard. She gets a couple of part-time jobs to help pay the bills, in the apartment she shares with Mercedes and Santana; waitresses at a cafe with the name of a saint down past Times Square, and sings at a bar in the LES.

It's not easy, and more than once Tina carries her pepper spray in her purse, and the memories of her mom's self-defense classes in her mind, whenever she hears the click of shoes behind her, but she's okay. New York is scary, sure, but for different ways. She cuts her hair and grows her streaks out (to her mother's delight) and pays her bills and even jogs on her days off. It's strange, the way she assimilates into Manhattan life, but she rolls with it. She wants to be different here.

Mike comes on a flying visit, once, just before Thanksgiving. He's loving the dance school, dating a girl in his tap class, and Tina doesn't feel the flicker of emerald-green jealousy that she thought she might.

"Is this what maturity feels like?" She asks Kurt one morning over cereal (he's stayed at the night; Blaine is out of town and they'd gone out drinking with fake IDs to a gay bar).

Kurt lifts his mussed head, cracking a bleary eye open. "Maturity doesn't feel like anything. It's just adolescence with bills and aching knees." He sinks back onto the couch, abandoning his sad bowl of Cocoa Puffs in lieu of sleeping away his hangover. Thank God it's the weekend.

Tina keeps audtioning for places. Local theatres, talent scouts, anyone who'll look past the stereotype for a second and see the performer. The singer. The girl who wants to make it on her own terms.

In the end, Mercedes ends up scoring her a three-minute audition for her record label boss, rushing between one meeting or another, and serenading him with an abridged version of "As Long As He Needs Me" because they'd watched the film last night. The boss gives her a once-over, smiles, and then heads off to his meeting, leaving Tina to go to the laundrette and practise her scales next to the machines so they can't complain about the noise. 

That night, after her shift at the diner, Tina is scrubbing the smell of burnt pancakes out of her hair and Mercedes is making her a bowl of soup when she checks her voicemail, and finds she's got a second audition. A formal one. She and Mercedes and Santana and Kurt and Rachel scream and dance and drink that night and it's worth the hangover the next morning.

After that, she gets work as a studio singer for bigger artists, working on their demos. She even picks up some production tips, uses her brain and thirst for knowledge to dig in deep into the technical side. Artie's proud of her when she tells him.

More importantly, she's proud of herself.

Tina's journey might not be a fairytale - not a Disney one, anyway. Hers is more likely to be a Grimm affair - princesses climbing the towers themselves and all that entails. She knows her odds. Her chances. How slim they are.

But that's fine. She's Tina Cohen-Chang, goddamnit; the daughter of third-generation Chinese immigrants who fought against racist hicks in a dumb state, a girl who fought a stutter and heartbreak and people slanting the corners of their eyes at her and calling her a _chink_ and a _gook_ , and came out of high school alive, with fire and passion and a drive to become who she's meant to be.

This is going to be _easy_.


End file.
